Graves' end

ground.

“Ingrid, listen to me,” he said. “He’s not gonna hurt you, not ever again. You or anybody else. You wanna know how I know?”

Graves drew a loaded.45 from a shoulder-holster he wore inside his jacket, racked it, and handed it to Ingrid, who took it in spite of herself. She looked down at it, seeming to marvel at its weight and the coldblooded elegance of its engineering.

“Cause we’re gonna go make sure of it together,” Graves told her. “You’n me, sister. Let’s finish this thing.”

He turned and marched back toward Caradura’s door, holding Stan’s dropped shotgun at the ready. Ingrid was still looking at the pistol in her hand.

“I can’t do that, Dex,” she said, and her tone stopped Graves cold. He whirled around to see her pointing his very own gun at him. She looked distressed by what she was doing, but her aim was all too steady. “And I can’t let you.”

“If this is a comedy act, it needs a lotta work,” he said.

“Let’s just go, Dexter. Right now. I’ll go with you. But you can’t… You just can’t…”

“Why are you protecting him?” Graves asked, in a low and ominous growl.

“I’m not,” Ingrid said. “I’m protecting you.”

Graves glanced pointedly at his pistol, clutched there in her unwavering hand. “Yeah, how could I have missed that?” he said. “Haven’t felt quite this safe since my time on Okinawa.”

“Don’t joke.”

“Is it Martin or fuckin’ Lewis that I look like to you?” he snapped. Before Ingrid could respond, he continued: “No, now you listen, sister, I came to get you outta here-”

“Then let’s go,” Ingrid said, sounding exasperated.

“But I’m not leaving this place till I know this thing is done. You get me? I am not walking outta this building while Mickey Fuckin’ Hardface is still around to walk this earth!”

Ingrid cringed at his vehemence, and he relented.

“You don’t wanna watch it, then wait here,” he told her, softly. “But don’t stand in my way.”

With that he turned and started for the door at the end of the hall.

“Dexter, don’t you go in there,” Ingrid half-warned and half-pleaded, her voice quavering as it rose by an octave or two. “I’m telling you, don’t do it!”

Graves stopped before Caradura’s door, but he didn’t turn back. He shook his last cigarette out of the pack and lit it with his Zippo, crumpling the empty cellophane in his other hand before tossing it aside. “I gotta do what’s gotta get done, Ing,” he told her. “You go ahead and do the same.”

He put his hand on the doorknob and the gun went off behind him, explosively loud in the narrow hallway. Graves’ brains blew out his forehead and spattered against the door, obscuring Miguel Caradura’s painted name.

His last coherent thought was that he really hadn’t seen that coming.

He stared for a disbelieving moment at the bloody gray matter that now decorated the door’s varnished surface, before his knees buckled and he slumped forward, shot dead. The boneless weight of his collapsing corpse pushed the door open even as it twisted his neck back at an angle that should’ve been painful, so that the last thing his dying eyes registered was Ingrid, still holding the smoking gun she’d used to murder him. Her eyes ticked to the floor when his lighter tumbled from his slackening hand. Graves was barely aware of it, himself. He couldn’t feel his hands anymore, or any other part of his body, either.

The final image that dissolved from his mind-as his scrambled brain sputtered out its last erratic signals and his vision faded away to black-was one of Ingrid, lovely Ingrid, anguished and sinking down to her knees.

Some unacknowledged span of time later the bell above the elevator bank dinged and its last undamaged door slid open, disgorging Juan San Martin. There was clotted noseblood all down the front of his expensive, custom-made suit. He looked to Ingrid like a man who’d recently been cracked in the face with a gunbutt.

He stopped dead as soon as he stepped out of the elevator, taking in the gory scene.

Ingrid turned away from him. She’d been sitting on the floor and silently weeping, some feet away from Dexter Graves’ cooling corpse. His.45 lay forgotten on the carpet beside her.

Beyond her, however, and just beyond the detective’s occasionally-twitching body, the door to Miguel Caradura’s office was still standing open, and there didn’t seem to be anything remotely resembling a conventional workspace in there, at the moment.

Big Juan gulped hard as he confronted the truth that lay behind the visual illusions his boss habitually kept up. Behind Caradura’s door was what appeared to be the inner sanctum of a pre-Columbian Aztec temple: two small, firelit rooms fashioned from stone and brown mud bricks. Torches soaked in pitch flickered on the walls and a round, blood-blackened altar stone dominated the second chamber, hulking in the spot where an executive’s desk might otherwise have stood.

Ingrid couldn’t be bothered to look, herself. She’d seen it all before.

Besides which, the cloaked figure of Mictlantecuhtli himself was currently standing in the rough doorway on the furthest side of his altar room, looking out over the miles upon miles of chaparral hills that rolled away under a leaden sky, in sharp contrast to the bright LA morning in 1950 that Ingrid knew was going on outside the Tower even now. She could sense Mickey’s quiet fury, and she didn’t want to risk making eye contact with him, should he happen to turn around. It was as much as she could do to remain composed already.

She therefore chose to concentrate on Dexter’s silver cigarette lighter, the last thing he’d held in life, lying where it had landed on the carpet, because looking at his inert body was also more than she could bear.

She’d never intended for him to follow her. She couldn’t even imagine how he’d ever found this place. But then, Dexter was different. Special. She was appalled by what she’d done to him, but when he turned up the way he had, unannounced and out for blood, she hadn’t known how else to stop him from going through that door.

Big Juan stepped around Ingrid, grasped Dexter by the ankles, and dragged him back the few inches he needed in order to close the office door again. Ingrid felt him pause for a moment before he did so, presumably taking one last look at Mictlantecuhtli’s shrouded, broad-shouldered back.

Then he eased the door shut and turned to face Ingrid, clearly at a loss in regards to her. “I–I’ll go get some stuff to clean up the, ah… the mess,” he said lamely.

Ingrid nodded, avoiding eye contact with the henchman the same way she had with his boss, and Big Juan took this as permission to flee the scene. He managed not to run, but he couldn’t keep the evidence of rubbery relief out of his posture entirely, as Ingrid observed once his back was turned.

She didn’t know for sure what happened next, but she found she could make some educated guesses. Her dreams that night were filled with her imaginings. The pictures waited in the wings of her mind until she was helplessly asleep in a lonely corner of the Silent Tower and unable to push them aside through conscious effort anymore.

In them, she watched Big Juan San Martin dump Dexter’s body into the middle of an old, paint-stained dropcloth and bundle him up like so much meat in a burrito. Blood from the bullethole in Dex’s head soaked through the canvas, but it was just one more stain on the Jackson Pollock cloth.

Even in her sleep Ingrid tried to banish such images, but she couldn’t help seeing Juan turn on his headlights as he rolled down out of a tunnel high up in the hills of Griffith Park. He was driving a bulky black Packard and taking an obscure route out of Hollywood in order to minimize his chances of encountering the police. She pictured him cruising through acres of San Fernando Valley orange groves, with the ripe fruits on the trees glowing like warm coals in the last of the day’s dying light.

He wended his way through oak-dotted hills on a dirt road as the sky darkened and the first stars began to appear.

Finally he was out in the roadless desert, miles away from civilization, alone in the flat and ugly scrublands where no sane person would ever want to live, not in a hundred years. His tires kicked up moonlit plumes of pale,